Have the Saudis contributed roughly since 1979 to a major historical shift in the Sunni Muslim world toward a more literalist, less tolerant attitude toward non-Muslims and non-Sunni Muslims? Yes. Have Saudi schools in the Kingdom and Saudi financing of Wahhabi mosques and madrassas abroad been the means for this giant misdeed? Yes. Have the Saudis bribed Americans and Europeans with "endowment" funds here and there to mute objections to this knavery in the West? No doubt about it. Have they been playing essentially a double game for many years, buying protection against radical threats at home by bribing them into export, as it were? Sure, absolutely.
So this means that the U.S. government should break ties with these villains, treat them as enemies, and seek regime change if possible? No, no, and no.
Posted by: lord garth ||
03/25/2016 09:16 ||
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#1
It means the US should not be kissing their arse but instead should be looking for alternate means of energy (nuclear baby!) to put them out of business while at the same time pushing them to cage the dogs they've unleashed.
h/t Instapundit
The fear and loathing with which Donald Trump is regarded by establishment Republicans, by the predictably hostile media apparatus, and by a veritable army of political pundits betokens not so much a reasoned analysis of the Trump phenomenon as an access of unbefitting panic. As historian Bruce Thornton notes, a substantial degree of historical nonsense is equally at work, as commentators like Bret Stephens, Dana Milbank and David Brooks have relied on "the stale ad Hitlerum fallacy used by progressives to demonize the candidate." For whatever reason -- political calculation, congenital idiocy -- such observers have simply gone off the rails.
...Who represents a threat to American democracy? Who has manipulated the democratic process? Who has embraced and fomented violence? Who has wielded government powers against personal enemies? Who has tried to hamstring a free (conservative) media? Who has stirred racial violence against whites and Christians while hosting incendiary black leaders and assuring us that the future does not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam? Who plays the victim/conspiratorial card and regularly blames others for his own failures? Who is the propagator of "sweeping, ugly lies" that many observers believe are impeachable offenses? The answer is blatantly obvious -- and it isn’t Donald Trump.
...Nobody with any sense believes that the Donald is the perfect candidate for the presidency. But he is not the problem. The problem is a culture that appears determined to sign its own death warrant, splintering into a congeries of special interest groups and reveling in a morass of identity politics, moral relativism and infantile grievances. The problem is the catastrophic legacy left by Obama on the racial, economic and foreign policy fronts, from which the nation may not recover irrespective of who the next president may be. The problem is the brace of leftist hacks and retreads vying for the Democratic nomination, one of whom will occupy the White House if fractious conservatives have their way. The problem is a Republican establishment vastly out of step with its core constituency and seemingly preoccupied chiefly with retaining its beltway perks and privileges.
[DAWN] ISLAM is in danger, yet again. The call by religious parties and the Council of Islamic Ideology to force a government retreat on the recently promulgated women’s protection act follows hot on the heels of the countrywide mobilisations that followed the hanging of Mumtaz Qadri. One wonders what will come next.
The recent spate of activity follows a period during which the religious right was in something resembling hibernation mode. Political correctness both in Pakistain and globally demands overt rejection of religious radicalism, and when our own military establishment is going through great pains to sustain an image of zero tolerance towards bully boy Islam it is to be expected that the mainstream right will follow suit.
Yet seasoned observers know better than to assume the murky links between the establishment and the bully boy right are a fact of the past. Indeed, while Pak officialdom insists that it is committed to abolishing the threat of religious militancy, it also clearly acknowledges that it is the primary interlocutor between the so-called Afghan Taliban and the government in Kabul
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
03/25/2016 00:00 ||
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[11127 views]
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[Reuters] The attack on Europe’s political capital on Tuesday has been widely blamed on bad intelligence; not just the dysfunctional separation of powers in Belgium, but on the lack of sharing of information among the many intelligence services of the 28 states of the European Union.
The services in the former Communist states to the east were reconfigured after the collapse of the Soviet-backed regimes in 1990, but some still contain habits -- and in a few cases personnel -- from the days when they saw the West European status quo; agencies as the enemy. Sharing, even at a low level, is tentative.
I interviewed several former officials of the secret services of the United States, France and the UK for "Journalism in an Age of Terror," a book to be published later this year. In comments that were inevitably off the record, they spoke about how they rated their allied services -- and also how they saw their main opponents, the Chinese and Russian services.
The Belgian security services are everywhere regarded as weak. That suspicion seems to have been confirmed, as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey claimed on Wednesday that the Turkish authorities warned their Belgian counterparts that one of the suspected bombers, Ibrahim el Bakraoui, was a dangerous terrorist.
The lack of centralization, which is a feature of all of the European agencies apart from the British, fulfills essentially a democratic criterion: that agencies unified present a greater danger to a democratic government than those kept apart, and competitive.
The instinct to so construct the intelligence services harks back to the experience of World War Two and the centralization of the services under authoritarian governments: but it hinders rapid decision-making and reform.
#3
The Belgian intel guys have to be careful they don't run into a bunch of connected high mucky-mucks diddling kids. See Marc Dutroux.
Posted by: Richard Aubrey ||
03/25/2016 8:12 Comments ||
Top||
#4
Easy to punch'em when they're down.
Doesn't make their work substandard. "Sharing, even at a low level, is tentative."
Imagine Houston TX police getting an alert, on one man, from Ottawa CAN. That's about the same distance in miles, and perspective, as Turkey to Belgium. The guy just used Turkey Gov. transport.
The US doesn't have much of a integrated criminal dataset either and we hope it doesn't happen because I'll be bounced for the expired license on my farm truck and someone will interview you about excess ammo purchases.
[Huffpoo] Six of the 19 9/11 hijackers were brothers. The Tsarnaevs blew up the Boston Marathon. The Kouachis shot up Charlie Hebdo. And now the Bakraouis have terrorized Brussels.
Brussels attack brothers Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui join a long line of terrorist siblings, and they won’t be the last.
Particularly in groups bound by ethnicity or religion, it is common for members of the same family to become involved in the organization. From the perspective of the terrorist group, engaging family members can help sustain both the commitment of participants as well as increase the likelihood of strong operational security.
Many siblings are recruited into terrorist groups together, with the older sibling often facilitating the entry of the younger family member. British twin sisters Zahra and Salma Halane, for example, arrived in Syria in 2014 and proceeded to try to recruit their younger siblings to join them. We observed this phenomenon during the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris by the Kouachi brothers and, at the Boston Marathon, by the Tsarnaev brothers.
Statistics prove that is not simply a random phenomenon. Six of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were brothers, and according to the research of Mohammed Hafez, as many as 25 to 30 percent of cases of terrorist acts involve members of the same family. Research from the New American Foundation showed that a third of Western foreign fighters had family connections.
When siblings join terrorist groups, they typically are deployed together in the same operation, although occasionally at different locations. That appears to have been the case with the Bakraoui brothers in Belgium, and it also occurred in Russia in 2004 with Amanta Nagayeva, a Chechen woman who detonated herself onboard Volga-AviaExpress Flight 1303 from Moscow to Volgograd on Aug. 24, killing everyone on board. Her sister Rosa killed herself and 10 others outside the Rizhskaya subway station in Moscow within a week.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Reuters] The attack on Europe’s political capital on Tuesday has been widely blamed on bad intelligence; not just the dysfunctional separation of powers in Belgium, but on the lack of sharing of information among the many intelligence services of the 28 states of the European Union. 
